Content marketing can be highly profitable, but only if you know how to measure, analyze, and improve your effectiveness.
How can you tell if your content marketing campaign is actually working? You can get a general feel, based on how people talk about your content and how many new leads you're getting, but you won't be able to move forward with any degree of certainty unless you're measuring your efforts with objective data.
But what are you supposed to measure? These seven metrics are some of the most important to know:
1.Organic Traffic. Content marketing and SEO are tightly interrelated, and organic traffic is a measure of how content is affecting your search rankings; it's the number of people finding your site through search.
2.Search Rankings. Traffic is good, but you should also see where and how you rank for various search terms. This can help guide the subject focus of your campaign.
3.Referral Traffic. If you're posting content offsite (as you should be), you'll be generating referral traffic. Look at which sources generate the most and least, and change your strategy accordingly.
4.Social Traffic. You'll be syndicating your content on social media regularly, so it's important to figure out how people are responding to it.
5.Blog Popularity. Which of your titles are getting the most traction? Which ones aren't getting touched? You'll need to know this to improve your topic selection.
6.Conversion Rate. All the traffic in the world won't mean much if you aren't earning conversions that turn that traffic into paying customers.
7.ROI. Your Return on Investment (ROI) is an aggregated measure of how much money your content campaign has earned you versus how much it has cost you.
If you can accurately measure and understand these metrics, you'll have a good understanding of where you stand in content marketing. Keep making adjustments, and adopt a mentality of ongoing improvement.
Bio:
Jose Vasquez is a serial entrepreneur and tech enthusiast dedicated to helping startup technology companies get the direction and momentum they need to succeed. As the founder of Build. Brand. Blast., Jose has established a collective resource for tech entrepreneurs to consult when brainstorming, creating, launching, or expanding a new business. Jose is also the founder and CEO of Quez Media Marketing, a marketing firm that combines technology and creativity to help new and growing companies get the results they need.